Perfluoropolymer Optical Waveguide Comparable to Silica in Optical Properties and Reliabilities

We fabricated single mode optical waveguides made of perfluoropolymers with extremely low propagation loss at communication wavelengths reaching even 1650 nm, and found they showed high reliability. The used materials are poly(perfluorinated butenyl vinyl ether) and the chemically-related materials. In this paper we report on the perfluoropolymer optical waveguides with dopant-free core, while we used dopant in the previous trials. The propagation loss was 0.03-0.04 dB/cm at both 1550 and 1650 nm. The spectral measurement showed that their propagation losses are lower than 0.1 dB/cm all over the communication wavelengths. High durability to humidity was also shown. These properties and reliabilities are incomparably better than the other polymer waveguides, and comparable to the inline optical waveguide devices made of silica. As an application of this optical waveguide, we demonstrated the 1x32 optical splitter.